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“The wall tore families and friendships apart, it uprooted people and led to an incredible amount of suffering,” said Thuringia’s Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (left), according to a statement from the Thuringian State Chancellery on Sunday. One is also thinking of everyone “whose striving for freedom led to spying, persecution and exclusion or imprisonment”.
Thuringia’s CDU state party and parliamentary group leader, Mario Voigt, described the construction of the wall as a “concrete certificate of surrender of socialism”. The Wall is the most visible sign “that the SED had recognized the futility of its efforts to impose its socialism on people as long as they were able to escape by fleeing,” said Voigt.